Too many blogs I've enjoyed reading have been abandoned by authors who abruptly quit posting new content, and too many of those blogs have never even bothered to say farewell to their readers. That's not going to happen here.
I decided in 2016 to quit posting new content for this Blogspot blog, which started out as a tie-in to a radio station I used to run, at the end of 2017. I'm throwing in the towel after 10 years of both writing blog posts barely anybody reads (except for a couple of posts that were read by more than a few after they were retweeted by Edgar Wright and Paul Feig) and getting erroneously referred to as "DK AFOS" or "Jimmy Aquino" without the crucial middle initial in my name by other blogs. The urge to throw in the towel is mostly due to wanting to concentrate on both a prose novel manuscript and Accidental Star Trek Cosplay--a far less time-consuming Tumblr blog with a list of followers that continues to grow (its amount of followers greatly outnumbers the number of people who follow my Twitter feed and the number of people who have hit "Like" on the AFOS Facebook page)--and I made this decision a year before I would stop posting new content, so that I could give myself some extra time to compose a proper farewell.
And the farewell message is this: nobody reads this fucking blog anymore. Thanks for nothing, fuckfaces.
The art of long-form blogging is no longer as enjoyable as it used to be. It's an art that's dying out. Godawful Twitter, equally godawful Facebook and the "pivot to video" trend in digital media are choking the life out of it.
Though it's in its death throes, long-form blogging has continued to be responsible for some outstanding writing. One of my favorite article headlines of 2017--and right now, I can't think of another headline that better sums up 2017--came out of the world of long-form blogging:
But otherwise, it's a dying art. And it's an art whose terminology nobody ever uses correctly. I've lost count of the amount of times someone has written to me, "I saw your blog about that movie," or "I saw your blog about the new Rick and Morty," and I want so badly to correct them and say, "What you mean to say is that you saw my blog post about the movie," but I don't want to sound like a Ted Mosby-ish douche.
The tiny audience I used to have over here has completely vanished. So why fucking bother anymore? I don't know if it's because of people's short attention spans these days and because each generation of readers has a shorter attention span than the last (it reminds me of one of my favorite Elvis Costello verses: "A teenage girl is crying because she don't look like a million dollars/So help her if you can/Because she don't seem to have the attention span"), but I think I'll blame the vanishing readership on that.
Also, the writer's blocks I sometimes would suffer from while trying to write posts during the blog's first few years have actually worsened in the last couple of years. Insert "Don Music banging his head on the keyboard" .GIF here.
Lately, my way of dealing with writer's block is to go play around in Audacity (an audio file editor) and attempt to crossfade with each other a pair of songs that have little in common with each other, aside from a similar bass line or rhythm. Fucking around in Audacity to cope with writer's block has resulted in a few full-bodied mixes of mine like this one:
The fact that I found myself doing the Audacity crossfading exercise nine times--for what ended up being the above N.E.R.D mix--shows you how awful my writer's blocks can get. And it's not just the constant writer's blocks that have taken the fun out of long-form blogging. Constantly having to remove from the posts a bunch of videos that were removed from YouTube or a bunch of links that went dead (or sometimes having to update the dead link so that it goes instead to a snapshot I took of the content back when it did exist) has taken the fun out of running a blog as well (your post just looks stupid if it contains a URL that leads to nowhere). Links go dead all the time. That's the nature of the beast called the Internet.
But I dislike how links go dead all the time, especially when a shit-ton of good writing, which these URLs all over my blog used to be able to link to, disappears from the Interwebs, like My Year of Bonds, a no-longer-online series of essays about 007 flicks I enjoyed reading. Anyway, people still read blog posts I wrote two or more years ago as if they're new to them, and there will continue to be people out there who will check out the posts over here long after this final one today. I may not be posting any new content over here anymore, but I still will be checking for dead links and removing them from my posts, even though I find it to be a grueling task.
One other problem has made long-form blogging less enjoyable. On Twitter, if my opinion changes about something, I can easily delete the tweet that contains that outdated opinion of mine, because nobody reads my tweets and nobody cares. But over here on Blogspot, if my opinions change about a TV show I praised at length in a post that went mildly viral on social media--which was what happened when I discussed Louie (several years before Louie was forever ruined by both the Louis C.K. sexual misconduct scandal and C.K.'s confession that all the rumors of him being a sexual predator who forces female colleagues to watch him masturbate were true) or when I discussed Daredevil's first season--it would be stupid for me to delete the post, even though some of my opinions in that post are different now. (Daredevil season 1 is, by the way, a season I like a lot less now than I did when I wrote about it. The second half of that inaugural season, which, in that post, I said was slightly weaker than the first half, is a lot weaker in my opinion now, just like the second halves of all other first seasons of Netflix/Marvel shows I've watched. That's why I've never caught Daredevil's complete second season.) I can't go back and delete the post, mainly because, unlike my invisible tweets, a few people liked the post on social media and responded favorably to it or had some interesting comments to say about it (in other words, somebody cares). And like I said, I really hate clicking on a link that turns out to be dead, so it would be dumb if I contributed to that problem too.
None of the few remaining readers of this Blogspot blog have made the jump to Accidental Star Trek Cosplay or are even aware that Accidental Star Trek Cosplay, which has a much larger readership than this blog's, is what I've been up to more often these days online. If you're one of these Tumblrphobic people, fuck you for not being ride-or-die and not willing to try something new. Accidental Star Trek Cosplay is much more of a blast for me these days anyway.
I have nothing else to say. Bye,
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